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By Root 395 0

for the country, though to this face was attached a body as plump as any. She was friendly and gentle, as such women invariably are; and as we left the café on foot for the hotel she chatted of this and that with such ease that the observer might have believed we were old friends. Her good humour was not out of place even in the hotel. The thin elderly lady at the desk, though businesslike and brisk in her starched apron, greeted my companion effusively. She said it was good to see my companion again, and looking so well; was she better? My companion replied that she was. The lady at the desk, studying the register I had signed, said that she was not surprised; she playfully reproached my companion with her earlier despair and said that in all circumstances we would be wiser to leave everything in the hands of God. And so we went up the dimly-lit carpeted stairs. No word had been said to me, it being the gracious custom of the ladies of these hotels to pay no attention to the clients of their clients. My smiling companion, appreciating my unspoken alarm at the talk of illness, explained that she had been slimming. Making a face of satire, and holding her hands wide apart, she said she had been fat, oh, but enormous.

The curtained room was warm; red-shaded bedside lamps made it cosy; at the same time it was somewhat surgical with its white, polished wash-basin, two small towels lying across its spotless bidet, and other towels lying neatly folded on the edge of the bed. I paid my companion the sum we had laughingly agreed on in the café. She stroked my cheek and said she didn’t like taking money beforehand – it was modern and rapacious – but she had had unpleasant experiences. Her courtliness delighted me. She left the room, doubtless to hand over some fraction of the sum I had given her to the lady of the hotel; I heard animated conversation between them. Presently my companion returned, somewhat out of breath, apologizing as to a child for her absence. I had undressed and was lying on the bed. I was beginning to know the depth of my exhaustion. Whatever excitement I had felt on entering the cosy, surgical room had subsided; and the smiling willingness of the young girl to please – I now saw that she was young – seemed remote, slightly touching, slightly absurd.

Without her outer garment – which she hung carefully over the back of the chair – she all at once appeared bigger than I had thought. She exceeded the generous standards of the country. Her arms were wide and slack. Her breasts had been pulled tightly upwards and flattened against her chest; even so they had appeared full and large. Now, with a sigh from my companion that turned into a laugh, these breasts were released. They cascaded heavily down. They were enormous, they were grotesque, empty starved sacks which yet contained some substance at their tips, where alone they had some shape. She unbound, untied, released herself. Flesh, striped, indented, corrugated, fell helplessly about her. Below those breasts, wide flabby scabbards which hung down to her middle, her dimpled, loose belly collapsed; flesh hung in liquid folds about her legs which quivered like risen dough. She was ghastly, tragic, a figure from hell with a smiling girl’s face, the thin starved face of the slimmer. Tormented by flesh, she offered knowledge of flesh. Fat, fat, she kept on saying, smiling, tragic; and courtesy, compassion answered for me, No, no. I knew I would never touch; and I feared being touched. Yet I never moved. Flesh, flesh, I thought: how could I disdain? How could I even judge? She lifted herself off the bidet and sat on the bed, liquescent flesh running laterally, her breasts touching what passed for thighs. I closed my eyes and waited.

No damp, flat, smothering embrace came; only the softest of words, the sweetest of breaths, a brushing – of those breasts? – against my nipples, the barest touch of a fingernail circling my areola. I never touched; my hands still lay at my side. Yet I was already turning in on myself; judgement was disappearing. Nails, tongue, breath and